Where Is the Real Pet Sematary?

The powerful Native American burial site in Paramount's  'Pet Sematary'

It was 1979. A guy went to visit Stephen King at his rental home in Orrington, Maine.

 

"You got a problem here with your daughter's cat," he told the novelist. 

Stephen followed the guy to the road next to his house. There lay Smucky, Naomi's beloved pet, dead. 

Smucky has become a statistic, joining many other dogs and cats that have fallen victim to the monster trucks barreling through this road. 

Naomi was inconsolable after she heard the news. She and her dad eventually buried Smucky in the nearby pet cemetery, created by the neighborhood kids for the mounting roadkill. "God can't have my cat," she shouted that night. "That cat is my cat! Let him have his own cat." 

A bright but dark idea dawned on Stephen when he heard his child's lament: What if this cemetery were to have magical properties that resurrects those buried in it? Parents don't even have to break the bad news to their children! 

And this is how "Pet Sematary" came to be. "I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road—and (I thought) what if a kid died in that road?" Stephen told Entertainment Weekly. 

His Orrington house is still standing today. In 2017, the four-bedroom abode at 664 River Road went on the market for $255,000. (The listing seems to have disappeared now.)

Smucky's resting place is supposed to have been somewhere "in the woods" near the house. Mary Lambert's 1989 adaptation of "Pet Sematary" was also filmed in Maine: The Creeds' home is at 303 Point Road in the town of Hancock, 37 miles away from Orrington. 

The graveyard for roadkill in the forest near Stephen King's former home at 664 River Road, Orrington, Maine (above via Zillow) inspired his 1983 novel 'Pet Sematary,' made into a movie in 1989 at Point Road, Hancock, Maine (below)